In Xanadu (21 page)

'That man is Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Speaker in our Parliament. He is a very progressive mullah.'

'In what way?'

'He thinks we should conquer Iraq before we declare
jihad
on the satanic West.' 'I see.'

Ah, this is Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, the Judge of the Revolution. He is very good judge, very fast judge.' 'Very fast?'

'Oh yes, I have heard that once he sentenced fifty-six Kurds to death in one day.' 'Fifty-six? Are you sure?' The man considered for a moment.

Yes,' he said, nodding his head thoughtfully. ‘I think fifty-six was the figure. Or maybe it was five hundred and sixty. It does not matter. They were not Shi'ites.'

He pointed to his left.

These men here are Martyrs of the Revolution. You see that man? He was the leader of the
Motorihaye-i-Allah;
What are they?'

They are the Allah's Motorized Ones. In the Revolution they were fighting the Shah's army from their sacred motorbikes. This man was killed by the Shah's Zionist troops in the Jaleh Square Massacre. It was a black day for Islam.'

He went up to the next poster and studied the caption.

This man here dressed up in women's
chador
for two years and was shooting policemen from beneath it. But he was caught by SAVAK, the Secret Police, and they killed him.'

He should have shaved off his beard.'

Perhaps. But we regard beards as very holy. The Prophet had beard and so all good Muslims grow one too.'

Even when they wear
chador?'

Yes. Especially when they
wear chador;

After
this the courtesy and charm of the Iranian customs officials was disappointing. Far from the beturbaned fanatics we had expected, they appeared almost embarrassed to have to search our rucksacks, and expressed polite approval at an illustrated book on early Islamic art they found in mine. No, they said, there was absolutely no question of being put in a bus and driven through the country, nor of being given an escort. The Islamic Republic of Iran was a free country. Where did we think we were? The Soviet Union? They all spoke perfect English, and seemed far more westernized than their counterparts on the Turkish side of the border.

The same was true of the Iranians we met outside. They were all returning from holidays in Europe and all possessed private cars, a luxury unheard of in Syria or Turkey. One family gave us a lift to the bus station in Maku, a few kilometres away. We sat in the back of their Alfa Romeo. Dariush had been at the Sorbonne, and now worked in a gum company. He expected to go on a business trip to England in a few months if he could get a visa. We swapped addresses. Dariush lived in Isfahan. If ever we were passing           

As we sat waiting for the bus to Tabriz, the next town on Marco Polo's itinerary, we watched the mullahs speeding past in their sporty Renault 5s. Iran was proving far more complex than we had expected. A religious revolution in the twentieth century was a unique occurrence, resulting in the first theocracy since the fall of the Dalai Lama in Tibet. Yet this revolution took place not in a poor banana republic, but in the richest and most sophisticated country in Asia. A group of clerics was trying to graft a mediaeval system of government and a pre-mediaeval way of thinking upon a country with a prosperous modem economy and a large and highly educated middle class. The posters in the bus station seemed to embody these contradictions. A frieze over the back wall of the shelter spoke out, in the name of Allah, against littering. On another wall two monumental pictures of the Ayatollah were capped with the inscriptions in both Persian and English:

BEING HYGENIC IS DIRECTLY RELATED ON THE MAN'S PERSONALITY.

and:

ALLAH COMMANDS THE RE-USE OF RENEWABLE RESOURCES.

We had expected anything of the Ayatollah. But hardly that he would turn out to be an enthusiastic ecologist.

Tabriz, claims my ever-optimistic guidebook, has 'a slightly old-fashioned, early nineteenth-century atmosphere with a distinct Russian flavour'. In several hundred years of travellers' accounts these are the only words of praise I have been able to find for the town. No one seems to have liked Tabriz. Still less have they liked the Tabrizis. The people of the place are poor creatures,' says Polo, 'and the worshippers of Mohammet there are an evil race." His Muslim near-contemporary, Ibn Battuta, reached a similar conclusion, although he admired the bazaar.

Every trade is grouped separately in it. I passed through the jewellers' bazaar, and my eyes were dazzled by the variety of precious stones that I beheld. They were displayed by beautiful slaves wearing rich garments with a waist-sash of silk. They stood in front of the merchants, exhibiting the jewels to the wives of the Turks, while the women were buying them in large quantities and trying to outdo one another. As a result of this I witnessed a riot - may God preserve us from such! We went on into the ambergris and musk market, and there witnessed another riot like it, or worse

The reason for this volatile prosperity in the late thirteenth ctntury was that the Mongol Ilkhans, the new rulers of Persia, had chosen Tabriz as their capital. From the time of Abaqa Khan, merchants flocked to its bazaars, where, in the words of a contemporary Tabrizi historian, they mixed with 'philosophers, astronomers, scholars and historians of all regions, of all sects: people of Cathay, of Machin, of India, of Kashmir, of Tibet, of the Uigur and other Turkish nations, Arabs and Flanks'. The town must also have attracted to its slums the refugees left from a hundred cities destroyed by the Mongol conquests. Suburbs and buildings sprung up. In the single generation before Polo's visit, the city had doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size. Alone in the wastes left by the Mongol devastation, it had been possessed by a sudden burst of frantic, uncontrolled growth.

In this respect the atmosphere of Tabriz on our arrival exactly parallelled that at the time of Polo. The oil wealth of the sixties and early seventies had financed a population explosion in the town, and if the town had ever had an old-fashioned, Russian flavour it had certainly lost it by the time we visited. Like any other rapidly developing town in the Third World, Tabriz was surrounded by miles of ugly urban sprawl.

*        *        •

'A une epoque elle etait tres jolie. Mais aujourd'hui c'est plus la meme ville.'
The Armenian pointed to a high-rise development facing his tiny bookshop. '
Ca
c'etait un jardin de the.'

His friend, a thin Armenian priest in his late thirties, nodded in agreement. He had done a PhD with the Dominicans at Blackfriars, spoke good English, and beamed when he discovered Laura was at Oxford.

The Shah let them do this to the town. He allowed anything as long as it looked modern and Western. There used to be gardens everywhere, and rows of lovely merchants' houses. But at least people used to have fun in the Shah's days. You see that building?'

He pointed down the street.

That used to be a cinema. Now it's another revolutionary lecture theatre. And over there. That used to be a bar. Now it sells non-alcoholic carrot milk shakes. You're not even allowed to play chess or backgammon anymore.'

We had come into the shop simply to try and find a Farsi-English dictionary, but it quickly became clear we would not be let out without accepting a cup of tea. Tadios, the priest, led us into a room behind the shop where he lit a burner on the gas stove and put a small samovar onto the flame. He sat down at the table, knitted his hands, and began reciting a litany of disasters.

According to Tadios the economy was in ruins, the factories were all closed, there was massive unemployment and inflation was out of control. A kilo of butter apparently cost twenty thousand rials - nearly thirty pounds sterling. Sugar, meat and eggs were all rationed and because the mullahs spent all Iran's foreign currency on arms, imports had run out. It was impossible, for example, to buy light bulbs any more. Or paint.

'What about the political situation?' I asked.

That's much more serious. Since the Revolution about forty thousand people have been thrown into prison for disagreeing with the mullahs. Many are just boys or girls. Thousands have been shot. Then there is the war with Iraq. So far about half a million people have been killed. Are you getting this down?'

He gave me a severe scowl as I scribbled the figures into my notebook. His initial light-heartedness had disappeared.

"We Armenians are not exempt. One of my brothers was killed fighting in the Ayatollah's war. Hundreds of our young have died. Yet do they treat us well in consideration of the Armenian blood they have spilled? No. I tell you, we are treated like fourth-class citizens. We are a cow, a donkey or a camel to them: they don't kill us but they beat us and make us work, using our skills for their ends.'

' Do they allow you to keep the churches open?' asked Laura.

The churches, yes. But they have closed all our schools and clubs, stolen our lands and expelled our missionaries. We are powerless to protest. We have to put up with whatever comes, and make a show of supporting the regime. Conditions are very bad. Every day it gets worse.'

'Why do you stay?' I asked.

'Many of us have gone,' replied Tadios. 'As many as thirty thousand have fled, either to the USSR or to Syria. After the Jews were expelled our people were frightened. But most remain. We have to weather the storm. We Armenians have been in Tabriz for thousands of years, always ruled by others. We have suffered worse than this. We will survive. We are a resilient people.'

Tadios got up and poured three glasses of tea from the samovar. He put a sugar lump between his teeth and sipped the tea through it. When he had finished he continued.

'Sometimes I am worried, though,' he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. 'For the last century or so there has seen some sort of consensus across the world as to how civilized men behave. You know. There is agreement that men should not be killed for peacefully believing in an idea, that every man deserves a fair, impartial trial, that all men have a right to express what they think. Often these values have been ignored, but however evil a government may be, it has always paid lip service to them.'

He refilled our glasses.

'Well it's different in Iran now. The Ayatollah does not believe that all men are free or equal. He does not believe in human rights. He accepts only the morality of the Koran. For the first time in modern history a government has built as its bedrock the idea that all men are in bondage to Allah. That frightens me very much.'